UX Designer, Author, Sketchnoter, Lindy hopper

Lindyroos UX & Front End

The Problem

Mark Calkins and Shannon Varner, a swing dance duo also known as The Lindyroos, had a stagnant Joomla website that they found difficult to update without technical support. They commissioned me to find and install a CMS with a small learning curve that they could update easily, and apply a visual theme that communicated their vintage dancing.

The Solution

Since the majority of their content was media files, we agreed the Retro Portfolio was perfect to invoke the vintage style, make it easy for them to reference their many YouTube videos of performances, and have a blog option for latest events and updates. A one page portfolio style was chosen because there isn’t an overwhelming amount of content, and it didn’t make sense to split it apart navigationally.

The Process

The final website required image alterations to the purchased theme to match Lindyroo branding, and I was given a set of images to crop for the slideshow. About a month after the initial launch, an additional section was required for the website, which meant altering the theme fundamentally. This alteration, the “House Party” section, is not pictured, but can be viewed on the live website.

I communicated with the original theme developer via email to determine how to add a new section to the main navigation. Other challenges included ensuring the custom theme CMS pages recognized the new section so Mark and Shannon could update it without needing to code anything. I also needed to make sure the new section referenced the dynamic fonts, which it wasn’t for quite a while. It was an interesting challenge, as I had never customized a bought theme to that level before, especially where I had to alter the CMS.

A couple tweaks to the WordPress code so their login page was branded, and voila! A one page portfolio pulling together all of their performances captured around the internet.